What has happened to the ‘media’?

Do you remember the last time you could trust the nation’s media to be accurate and fair?

U.S. media credibility became an issue following the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Press associations actually formed commissions to review the problem. But recent polls show the public’s faith in the media continues to decline.

Why?

Ironically, some of the great news organizations that prospered as champions of the free press in the United States have become monopolies. In the process they lost not only the thrill of competition but also respect for diverse points of view. So the price of winning was losing a genuine relationship with their audience.

Privately-owned news organizations that cultivated relationships of trust and shared values with their communities have been replaced by purely commercial enterprises that struggle to survive with subsidies from wealthy interests with ideological agendas.

With the explosion of electronic media in the 20th Century and more recently the Internet revolution, advertising has become a foundation of shifting sand for the news business. The proliferation of new media platforms has diluted the advertising base. As a result, many once-great newspapers that were in effect printing money on their printing presses are now seen as bad business propositions.

During the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the winning candidate did an end-run around the establishment media with his own social media accounts and actually won.

Social media provide a wide spectrum and volume of information from a dizzying array of sources. Audiences make decisions on the veracity of such information based on faith in those they presume to be their friends or with whom they identify in other ways.

Thus many educated and sophisticated readers look for authoritative content to corporate media giants such as the New York Times and the Washington Post which by their own admission have partisan political biases. Community newspapers increasingly defer to such monopolies for serious national and Washington coverage while focusing on local news.

In an era when foreign news is increasingly relevant to local communities and economies, Americans increasingly turn to state-controlled organizations such as RT, BBC or Al Jazeera with editorial policies that are sometimes in direct conflict with U.S. long term interests. Other foreign news bureaus are maintained primarily by British newspapers.

Is this the scenario that the American Founding Fathers envisioned?

The Free Press serves the public good by shining
the light of Truth, holding the powerful accountable
to individual citizens who were “endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,”
as the Declaration of Independence affirmed.